Butts merits attention for her ability to stand out at times amid a group of outstanding writers, but the weakest of her...
This collection may depend more on the author’s historical interest than the writing’s quality, but when it’s good, it bears the reminder that T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford encouraged her.
Butts (Ashe of Rings and Other Writings, 1998, etc.) ranged widely in her life (1890-1937) and writing among ideas, relationships and places. Rural England, London, Paris and the Riviera furnish settings; booze, drugs and the occult supply atmosphere. This breadth or restlessness is reflected in the variously bland, challenging, annoying and accomplished short fiction presented here. The long early story “In Bayswater” anticipates kitchen-sink drama with its “small, beastly tragedy” involving a dysfunctional family and an intrusive outsider—a topic she revisits and revamps. Two stories later, the brief and mystifying meditations of Bellerophon compose one of several classical excursions. Then comes the fine “Angèle au Couvent,” a well-told, conventional and probably autobiographical tale about girls at a convent school. She also does a nice ghost story in “With and Without Buttons,” in which a plot to frighten someone with oddly placed gloves backfires on the plotters. In “Madonna of the Magnificat,” she imagines, quite distinctively, the thoughts and conversations behind Mary’s accepting her role as mother of God. Such historical ventriloquism arises again in the engaging narrative of “A Roman Speaks,” which revisits the kidnapping of a young Julius Caesar. Butts’ writing occasionally reveals what might have been had she focused on her craft, as in her description in “The House Party” of "the sea-washed, fly-blown, scorched hotel along the coast” or the evocative “[s]hadows on the moon-candied stones, cat-black and sharp.” Too often, she risks losing the reader with near-drivel: “Our affair was described in sentences that depended upon a sentence that was not written.”
Butts merits attention for her ability to stand out at times amid a group of outstanding writers, but the weakest of her uneven output may dampen even historical interest.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62054-009-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: McPherson & Company
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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